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New, updated plays will take center stage in Actors Theater's new season

The theater's artistic director listed among the many variables to be considered: choosing plays that will make the season financially viable and looking at schedules to make sure the directors and/or actors are available at specific times.

"Picking a season is complex," Les Waters said recently as he talked about the productions scheduled for Actors Theatre of Louisville's 2014-15 season.

The theater's artistic director listed among the many variables to be considered: choosing plays that will make the season financially viable and looking at schedules to make sure the directors and/or actors are available at specific times.

With the desires and discernment of Waters and associate artistic director Meredith McDonough added to the mix, the theater's season brings back several familiar faces for new projects and several new plays that premiered only a few years ago.

One familiar entry on the list is playwright Naomi Iizuka's "At the Vanishing Point," which Waters directed in the 2004 Humana Festival of New American Plays. The play, which Actors commissioned, takes place in Butchertown and includes a cast of characters that reference that neighborhood's familiar haunts — including meatpacking factories and Hadley Pottery.

The play also includes Lexington photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, who had a primary career as an optician but before his 1972 death created work that has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography and Art Institute of Chicago.

"Things have changed a lot in 10 years," Waters said of mounting the play a decade after its premiere.

Before it gets its second run at Actors in January, the play also will go through some changes. Waters said Iizuka, whose work Waters also directed in his former position at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, is slated to come to Louisville this summer to do further research so she can rewrite parts of the play. What those are, Waters didn't say. But he did add that the production will include original music by Kentucky musician Ben Sollee. (The 2004 production featured music by Tara Jane O'Neil, who was once part of the Louisville music scene.)

Also among the familiar is the Bard, who makes an appearance every other year in the theater's Bingham Shakespeare Series. But that's not the only familiar name. The season-opening production of the early comedy "Love's Labour's Lost" is an adaptation reimagined by Steve Epp, Nathan Keepers and Dominique Serrand. The trio were part of another 2004 production, Moliere's "The Miser." Serrand directed both Epp and Keepers, who were in the cast. And they returned for the 2010 Humana Festival run of "Fissures" with Serrand and Epp as co-writers and Keppers in the cast.

"They have a distinctive physical syle that I find very exciting," Waters said. "But they also have a real passion for that play."

While their work often features surprises, Waters isn't letting on as to what "Love's Labour's Lost" might include.

"I have an inkling, but they are still developing the piece," he said.

Besides "The Vanishing Point," music also will be a big part of Jason Robert Brown's "The Last Five Years," which McDonough will direct. The musical about the breakdown of a couple's relationship premiered at Chicago's Northlight Theatre in 2001 with an off-Broadway production the next year, and it was on stage again last year when Brown directed a limited engagement at New York's Second Stage Theatre.

"It's just two performers and a band," Waters said. "But the storylines for each character go in different directions. One tells the story from the beginning to the end, and the other tells it from the end to the beginning. They meet in the middle."

The season also includes Tarell Alvin McCraney's "The Brothers Size" and "Tribes" by Nina Raine.

"I read 'Tribes' a couple of years ago and thought it was an extraordinarily powerful family drama," Waters said.

"Tribes," which tells the story of a family in which the youngest child is deaf, made its mark on American theater by winning the 2012 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play. That was two years after it premiered at London's Royal Court Theatre. Over the past several seasons, "Tribes," which also deals with the politics in the deaf community, has been produced at several regional theaters.

But Waters described a more common thread in the play.

"It's about figuring out how to find your own voice within a community and within a family," he said. "How do you get your family to hear you?"

With McCraney's "The Brothers Size," Actors Theatre is bringing one of the newest and brightest voices in American theater to its stages. McCraney, who was raised in Florida, is a resident playwright at New Dramatists in New York, writer-in-residence for London's Royal Shakespeare Company and a member of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Ensemble. Last year, at age 32, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. He also was an assistant to August Wilson when he was a student at the Yale School of Drama.

"I think he is one of the most original voices in contemporary American theater, and I think he writes in a most beautiful and poetic way," Waters said.

"The Brothers Size," which is part of a trilogy of works called "The Brother/Sister Plays," tells the story of Oshooshi Size, who after his release from jail goes to work in his brother's auto repair shop only to be faced with seeing someone from jail come to the shop. KJ Sanchez, who in recent years directed "The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity" and "ReEntry," about soldiers adapting to life after war, at the theater, will direct.

The annual holiday productions of "Dracula" (in the weeks leading up to Halloween) and "A Christmas Carol" round out the season.

Reporter Elizabeth Kramer can be reached at (502) 582-4682. Follow her on Twitter at @arts_bureau.

ACTORS THEATRE'S 2014-2015 SEASON

"Love's Labour's Lost" by William Shakespeare

Reimagined by Steve Epp, Nathan Keepers and Dominique Serrand

Directed by Dominique Serrand

Sept. 2-21, Pamela Brown Auditorium

"Dracula"

Originally dramatized by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston from Bram Stoker's "Dracula"